Sasol secures $1.8bn for Lake Charles project, in Louisiana

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Sasol secures $1.8bn for Lake Charles project, in Louisiana

8:14 CAT | 07 Jun 2019

Sasol's Lake Charles Chemical Project

SE-listed petrochemicals company Sasol announced on Friday that its subsidiary Sasol Financing USA had entered into new US dollar-denominated senior unsecured credit facilities, comprising a $1.6-billion term loan facility and a $150-million revolving credit facility.

The facilities have a tenor of five years and will be used to refinance the outstanding Lake Charles Chemical Project (LCCP) asset finance loan.

Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Mizuho Bank and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation were mandated as global coordinators, bookrunners and mandated lead arrangers for the transaction, which was syndicated to a targeted group of relationship banks.

Along with the bookrunners, there were two other mandated lead arrangers – BNP Paribas and Industrial and the Commercial Bank of China’s London branch.

Bank of China’s Johannesburg branch, China Construction Bank’s Johannesburg branch, Citibank, Intesa Sanpaolo’s New York branch, JP Morgan Securities and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group joined as lead arrangers.

Rothschild & Co and Identity Advisory acted as independent financial advisers to Sasol in respect of the transaction.

Engineering News Online last month reported that Sasol had announced another large increase in the capital cost of the LCCP, in Louisiana, in the US, and that it would accelerate its $2-billion noncore asset disposal programme and use the proceeds to deleverage its balance sheet.

Joint president and CEO Bongani Nqwababa had said, at the time, that the JSE-listed group was “extremely disappointed” in having to confirm a further upward revision to the capital cost of the LCCP project, which was now expected to be between $12.6-billion and $12.9-billion.

In 2014, the group had said the Louisiana project would cost $8.9-billion to build, but there have been several cost revisions since, the latest being in February, when Sasol provided a cost-to-completion range of between $11.6-billion and $11.8-billion.